A Princess of the Chameln

by Cherry Wilder

  “For Old Hop’s sake, Ensign Venn,” said Marten, a red-haired woman who rode behind with her friend Farrer, “Keep that vicious brute in order. If he side-skips again I will run mad.”

  “Ease up,” said Farrer. “If anyone can ride him, Venn can.”

  Dusk lugged badly, as if he knew he was being talked about, and Aidris wrestled with him and scolded. She was embarrassed when the kedran complimented her on her riding: it was as if one said she breathed well or knew how to eat her dinner. The likeness to table manners held good: her style, even after five years, was different. She did not come naturally to the dressage, her talent was rather for staying on. Raff Raiz had said she rode like the jockeys, the prize riders of Lien.

  When they came home to Kerrick, she made haste to visit Telavel, out in the paddock with the brood mares. She counted again . . . Willow, Birch, Elm, Oak, Apple . . . it seemed like a life sentence. She traced a few white hairs on Telavel’s nose; the mare was ten years old.

  Ortwen said she was pleased to hear that Aidris had kept out of trouble in Varda.

  “New Moon . . . do they suit you, those hearts?” she asked slyly.

  Grey Company had had no pairs of kedran lovers, but in New Moon only Aidris and the Lieutenant were unmatched, and Yeo was the friend of Megan Brock. She found them no better or worse to ride with than other soldiers.

  “Everyone will have a friend if she can find one,” said Aidris. “It makes no difference if some of these are lovers too. Remember how I was called your dear and your kedran wife?”

  “Gossip,” said Ortwen, “‘maids’ talk. But what of your lady at the hall?”

  “I love Sabeth,” said Aidris. “She is like my sister. I would say I loved you too, except that you would throw me in the horse trough . . .”

  She ducked under Ortwen’s arm as it swung over her head. The tall girl blushed and smiled.

  “We are too shy, maybe,” she said, “or it is simply not in our blood.”

  Sergeant Fell kept a close watch on Telavel and believed she would come to term early because of her small size. The little mare, who had been late to show, rounded out like a tun. Aidris had a nagging worry. She thought of a foal’s birth as more painful and dangerous than the birth of a child. In the middle of Lindenmoon, Gavin woke her early; she scrambled into her gear and ran to the birth stall. The old sergeant stood in the doorway, and Aidris saw that her eyes were full of tears.

  “Oh tell me . . .” she cried out.

  “Oh Goddess!” said Sergeant Fell. “Oh heaven and earth! It is a dream, a wonder! Venn, why did you not tell me?”

  Aidris ran to the stall, and Telavel was on her feet, snorting and sweat-streaked. The foal lay in the straw, and it was pure, pearly white, more beautiful even than the foals of the Chameln grey: it was a colt foal of the Shallir, the children of the sea. The Sergeant and Aidris knelt and soothed and praised Telavel like two fools. Telavel nudged the foal to its feet, and it stood with splayed legs nuzzling for her milk, while Sergeant Fell extolled all its points.

  “So rare . . .” she said at last. “I have heard of mules, marked with grey, from the donkey mares, but this is a wonder. I tell you they never breed in captivity. Venn, Venn . . . you could sell this lovely thing for a king’s ransom!”

  “Never,” said Aidris. “It is Telavel’s child.”

  “Name it . . . think of a name. Take your time.”

  “I have a name,” said Aidris. “He will be called Tamir, which means Sea Oak in the Old Speech.”

  The news of the wonder spread far and wide. The kedran and the housefolk and all the men and women of the countryside for miles around found time to come and watch the foal of the Shallir running beside its mother in the paddocks.

  “Trouble,” said Ortwen. “A moon at the seaside, and here is a miracle to show for it. What will you do with this lovely prize?”

  “Bring him home to the Chameln lands.”

  It was easy to say this, but she knew that the way had become longer than ever. She was, for the first time, putting off her return instead of looking forward to it. She must remain in Athron for two years, three, until Tamir was full-grown, until he was broken in. What year was this? The year of young things, of the white foal and the baby Imelda.

  From the first when her black hair fell out in handfuls upon her lace pillow and grew in bright gold, Imelda was a forward child. Sabeth and the new waiting-women and Amédine, a young matron from a nearby manor with babies of her own, could only marvel at her. She walked before she was a year old, ran soon afterwards. Kerrick Hall was like a barnyard, complained Lord Huw, with all the hens ruffling after one chick.

  Niall of Kerrick had gone into Eildon alone and on foot, with only his dog for company. Sir Gerr rode out to a tournament, then on a longer journey, almost a quest, to the north, near Parnin, to help Sirril of the Green against certain cattle thieves who had driven his herds into the Black Plains. He took Rowan Company, whose horses were of the Kerrick breed, and two companies of men-at-arms. The kerns and kedran remaining were busy with the harvest and with autumn floods when the river Flume spread over the meadows and carried away its bridges.

  Aidris was out of quarters now and lodged on the second storey of the barracks in the small cell-like room of an ensign. It seemed to her a wonderfully pleasant and comfortable place, with a tiny mullioned window that overlooked the house paddocks and the river, further off. She made her room fine with her fur cloak on the pallet bed and an embroidered picture of a Carach tree that Sabeth had given her. She had a wine cask cut down for a desk and sat looking out at her two darlings, Telavel and Tamir, racing about the nursing field.

  At the New Year for the first time there was no gift box for Sabeth and herself from the faithful Nenad Am Charn. Aidris was disappointed and vaguely alarmed; she recalled that the envoy meant to go to Achamar. She was glad to ride out again with New Moon Company for the taking of the annual tribute. It was a long and troublesome duty this year with a visit to a horse auction, and she did not come to the house in Tower High Street until her last day in Varda.

  The spring weather was cool and showery; under the sign of the double oak there stood a minstrel in a threadbare cloak who strummed a tarika. He sang a melancholy strain from the northern tribes; she recognised the elderly page of the Countess Palazan Am Panget and flung him a piece of silver. The trading room was empty except for four Melniros at a table drinking apple brandy and Racha Am Charn at a counter.

  The envoy’s son smiled at her approvingly.

  “Ah, Ensign Venn. I have your New Year’s box. My father left word . . .”

  “A letter?”

  “No. He is still in Achamar with my mother and sisters.”

  “He is well? No harm has come to the family?”

  “None!” said the young man with a glance at the men of Mel’Nir. “The borders are open. He is a loyal servant of the Protectorate.”

  “I am not!” she said sharply.

  He flushed and lifted the gift basket down from a shelf. Outside in the street, the voice of the minstrel rose in a song she had never heard before; its words were in the Old Speech.

  “The Winter Queen and the King of Summer

  Will cast them down.

  The men of Mel’Nir are tall as trees,

  They will lie dead on the plain.

  Proud Lord Werris,

  Where are your warriors?

  The Queen has come and the young King at her side,

  O ancient land, rejoice!”

  “Do you have the Old Speech, Master Am Charn?” she asked.

  “No . . . Yes, a little,” he said. “It is treasonous rubbish. The old fool sings to vex me, Ensign. I have stricken the charity lists for those beggars on Goose Lane.”

  She felt a dull sadness.

  “Exile is long,” she said. “Have the Chameln lands become so poor and their envoys so niggardly that they have no pensioners?”

  “I am accountable,” said Racha Am Charn. “I have to balanc
e the books!”

  Aidris went out into the street; her frail link with the Chameln lands had snapped. There was no one in Varda who knew her true name or where she could be found. She stood beside the old minstrel. He had a dark, bony visage like a carved mask upon a spirit tree; he began to sing again:

  “Far off, far off in Achamar

  The fires are lit,

  The King and the Queen have come home,

  O let me live till that moon!”

  “A fine song!” she said in the Old Speech. “Is it of your own making?”

  He bowed his head and smiled, rather distantly. She thought she recognised the arrogance of a senior servant, a butler or majordomo, who made small talk only with persons of equal rank.

  “I pray you, good sir,” she said, “bring this gift basket to the Countess Palazan Am Panget at House Imal on Goose Lane.”

  She wandered off into the streets of Varda and sat in a small park with a Carach tree before returning to New Moon Company. She began to smile, thinking of Nenad Am Charn and his advice to her. The proud old minstrel had really done her a service. If he had spoken kindly to a fellow-exile, she might have been tempted to visit House Imal, to be among Chameln folk, even to be queen for them for an hour. So she resigned herself to ride out of Varda again, and she was glad not to visit the city next spring.

  Before the winter Telavel was back in training. Aidris returned to Grey Company as ensign, and Hanni went home to Westport with her friend Rigg, the man-at-arms. Word came back that they had sailed on a trading vessel.

  The wheel of the year turned; in the first days of the Thornmoon, the month of sacrifice, she woke at night in her friendly room and fumbled under her pillow for the scrying stone.

  “I had forgotten the day,” she said hoarsely. “May the Huntress forgive me . . . I had forgotten the day!”

  In the world of the stone, there were two golden crowns and a bunch of oak leaves. The voice of the Lady said, faint and soothing: “The day is not yet done . . .”

  Then the stone was filled with glittering mist and when it cleared she saw a blaze of candles and a festive table. The luxury that she saw, the slashed and puffed satins that the guests were wearing and the brilliance of their jewels, aroused in her a kind of squeamishness. This was how Athron folk looked upon the ways of Lien. She concentrated upon the young man at the head of the table.

  The chair he sat in was tall and grand as a throne, and she could see that he himself had grown straight and tall. Sharn Am Zor was more than ever the model of a prince: his bright hair had not darkened, his features combined the strength of Esher, his father, and the striking beauty of Aravel, his mother. His eyes were a deep and brilliant blue. If Aidris found any fault with him, it was that he did not smile enough and looked out upon the world with a hint of his old petulance.

  Behind him and over his head as a canopy hung two cloths of state, richly embroidered with the crests of Lien and of Hodd, Chernak, Winn, Farsn, of the mountain feoff of Vedan, of Radroch and Nevgrod, the crests of all his possessions and offices, and in the midst of these smaller crests the twin oak trees of the Daindru. Sharn Am Zor had this day come of age. He was King of the Chameln lands, her co-ruler; and by these rich banners, she knew he held to his right and to hers.

  She had time to look quickly at those who joined the new king in his celebration. They were all strangers. Aravel was not to be seen, the Markgraf Kelen and his lady were not present. There was no one who could be singled out as a relative, still less as a teacher or governor or even a steadying influence. A man of about thirty with brown hair sat at Sharn’s left hand, and a lovely young woman on his right. The guests raised crystal goblets filled with the red wine of Lien, and as they drank the stone became dark.

  Sir Gerr of Kerrick, back from the north, tended to the running of the estates while his father Lord Huw sat with a leg in splints from a fall in the hunting field. Aidris perceived that this suited the young knight very well; he was busy and carefree, without any hint of a tormenting ambition. At New Year, Niall of Kerrick returned, “quiet and full of secrets” as Sabeth put it, after his stay in Eildon. He came like a pilgrim, walking back through the snows in a long, dark cloak, with his black dog at his heels, and shut himself up in his rooms in the north wing. Ortwen Cash came back after New Year, betrothed again, this time to the smith’s son, the steady fellow she had thrown over once before.

  “This time,” she said to Aidris, “I’m tired of quarters.”

  “Do you like him? Is he your friend?”

  “Surely,” said Ortwen, smiling. “And he is a gurt big fellow. We’re suited.”

  They sat in Aidris’s room eating dried fruit from the gift basket. It had come from Racha Am Charn. He went so far as to inform the ensign that his family still remained in Achamar; the borders had been closed “on account of some unrest.” Aidris remembered the words of Nenad: “There will be an insurgence . . .”

  Down below in the house paddocks were the foals and their mothers, and over the fence six or seven colts and fillies. Brown, bay, red-roan. One, not the tallest but the most spirited and striking, was white.

  Tamir was all her joy. She had him hand-tame, spoiled him most tenderly. In the spring he wore his headband, then he ran the circle in the training field with Aidris holding the long rope. She had good advice, too much of it, but she went on steadily, by herself, often with only Telavel to encourage the pair of them in their antics. The blanket, which he took to at once; the bit which he could not abide. Aidris would watch him circling, giddy with concentration.

  In the long summer evening Sabeth came down with the child running ahead, to see the white horse. Imelda cried out, and Tamir put on a show for her, flinging off his blanket, kicking up his heels, then suddenly all charm and docility when he saw that Telavel was getting a piece of apple.

  “He is a child,” said Sabeth.

  Aidris felt pity in her glance. Sabeth hoped for a son at the year’s end.

  “Venn, Venn,” said Megan Brock, strolling through the twilight. “He is two years old. Are you one of these spidery little wights who ride for gold in Balufir?”

  “I weigh no more, Captain.”

  Still, she took her time. She spent half of her stored soldier’s pay, half a dowry, at the saddler’s shop in Garth. The copy of Telavel’s saddle was excellently done but much plainer.

  “My Goddess, lass,” said the saddler, “this foreign thing was most fancily wrought, with the tooling and the runes, are they, and the gold and the green. Fit for a queen, when it was new!”

  Now Telavel’s saddle was worn and faded. They carried the new saddle back to Tamir and let it lie in his stall. He gave it a kick, as if he knew very well what it was for.

  “For Shame!” she said fondly. “For Shame, Tamir!”

  She was alone in that wing of the stable with only a few loose boxes tenanted. Outside the summer night came down. She picked up a shell that hung on the rail of Tamir’s stall and listened to the ocean. How far to the lands below the world? How long to sail to those lands?

  By Carach Troth at the summer’s end, she was riding Tamir every day for exercise. He learned quickly, but she sensed a wildness in him, an unquenchable spirit.

  “You have done the right thing,” said Sergeant Fell. “He is as well-broken as he can ever be. He loves you, and he loves to parade about, to lead the field. And maybe, if you had left him a little longer . . .”

  “What then?”

  “He would have led all the fillies away to the woods,” replied the old horse doctor.

  They rode in the river fields with Sergeant Fell on Telavel. At full gallop, feeling the strength of Tamir, she tried to recall the plain, the endless silver grass of the plain and the long hair upon the spirit trees, but her memory had grown faint.

  “This one,” said the sergeant, “this little mare is a wonder as much as your white king, her son. What I would give to see a full troop of these sweet souls.”

  “Captain Brock has hop
es of another White Company,” said Aidris.

  “Not with Tamir!” said the sergeant. “He is not the lad for it.”

  The harvest came in, and Thornmoon was unusually hot. There were fistfights in the stableyard, and the new recruits, kerns and kedran alike, led to a lot of head-shaking from the veterans. Niall of Kerrick, going about again, began to plan a pageant for the Winter Festival, with music, maskers and dancing. In the dark of the Thornmoon Aidris had a strange dream: she was riding through a dark wood, among a press of other riders, all silent, and they came to the edge of a precipice. She felt a cold wind and looked down into a deep gulf. An old man spoke up in her dream and said, “. . . many hundreds, but it will not serve them, poor devils.”

  Then a woman laughed aloud; it seemed like the captain, Megan Brock, and she whistled a tune, there in the darkness. Aidris woke shuddering at the dream, though she could not explain it. She looked into her scrying stone, and it was dark; it had been dark for many days.

  Aidris came back from the stableyard still wet from the pump and began to climb the stairs to her quarters. Half the troop had ridden to Stayn for the raising of a roof-tree, but Grey Company had a free day and were all off on their own occasions. She was tired and dusty from exercising both her horses. It was early afternoon with a first breath of autumn in the air.

  “Aidris!”

  Niall of Kerrick stood by the stairs looking up and with him old Gavin the Waker. She stared at them and was afraid of the way they looked at her.

  “Riders,” Gavin was saying. “Riders have come . . .”

  “Riders from the Chameln lands!” said Niall of Kerrick.

  She felt something that was close to panic. She ran just as she was out through the stableyard towards the front of the Hall. A crowd had collected at the end of the avenue. She pushed her way through. Ten riders were dismounting; there were tall banners.

  Bajan stood in the courtyard. A tall man, Lingrit Am Thuven, had approached the steps of Kerrick Hall, and Nenad Am Charn stood beside him. The trading envoy was the spokesman, and he cried out in a loud voice to Gerr of Kerrick, who waited before the doorway.